Medium-chain hydrocarbons are important chemical components for widespread and valuable industries including plastics, polymers, and cosmetics. These compounds are overwhelmingly produced from petroleum products, and therefore represent a pressing opportunity for environmentally-friendly methods of production. Naturally produced fatty acids in photosynthetic green algae are an excellent starting point for sustainable medium-chain hydrocarbons, as the carbon chain length of free fatty acids can be tightly controlled and further enzymatically converted to a variety of useful functionalities. However, a major obstacle to bioengineering efforts is that the mechanisms which regulate fatty acid chain length are still not well understood. Biosynthesis of fatty acids occurs in an iterative fashion, with a number of distinct enzymes participating in the elongation of an acyl chain covalently tethered to a carrier protein. When an appropriate chain length has been reached, a thioesterase enzyme can hydrolyze the acyl chain and create a free fatty acid. Some thioesterases have been shown to specifically act on medium-chain fatty acids, but their activity has not been easily translatable to heterologous host organisms. This project seeks to understand the chain release mechanism of fatty acid biosynthesis in the model green algae <i>Chlamydomonas reinhardtii </i>using chemical probes and structural studies in an effort to engineer medium-chain fatty acid production.

Engineering medium-chain fatty acid production in green algae

ACS Spring 2022

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